I'm on vacation, it's rainy, so I might as well write and maybe provide a little more insight into my thinking on e4.
Now, to start, I must first apologize for the tactless way of bringing this up as I did. As the title stated and I tried to reiterate throughout the entry, these are my fears for how the CDT fits in with e4. Nothing more, nothing less, and certainly not meant as a personal attack on anyone working on e4 (and no, despite common belief, I don't work on e4). It was really targeted at those outside the e4 community to take some time and understand how e4 impacts them.
I've sent a request for feedback to the cdt-dev list, so if you're there or even if you're not, please send me a response. I really want to know what the needs of the CDT community are so that I can properly feed them to the e4 team. The feedback I have so far, and so far it's been private, but that's OK, is that e4 is OK if we don't have to do anything significant to adopt it. Which then brings up the point of why adopt it if we're not going to take advantage of any of it. The other feedback that I got is that e4 isn't solving problems that our community has. Hopefully I'll get some more information. But, so far, it does justify asking the question and justify my fears.
My biggest fear for Eclipse is apathy. We're all working on our projects and being successful at it. As I said, I'm a happy user of the Eclipse SDK and CDT, especially with the new CDT 6.0. And I'm bragging about it to the Android NDK community as we speak. I know a lot of people question e4. I just happened to be dumb enough to blog it out loud.
Doug,
ReplyDeleteYou don't even try to answer the question in your blog title? What is your vision of Eclipse?
I applaud the e4 team for pushing forward. They have a vision and are doing their best to implement it. They aren't just talking and blogging, they are delivering code. I have a lot of respect for people who deliver code.
It seems like you might not share in their vision or are worried about the change. As you know, change is hard and change takes time but change always happens. That I know for certain.
You're right Ian. I noticed that after I posted. I didn't really state what the vision was.
ReplyDeleteI think our point is that our vision for Eclipse is what it is already. We don't need a new platform, just a few tweaks here and there. Eclipse as an IDE rocks as it is today. What we need is stability and high quality. Our fear is that e4 will disturb that.
I'm sure you read my other posts. I have no problem with change. I recently mentioned that I think the next gen IDE is not so far away. In fact, I even agree that's it based on web technologies, the IDE in the Cloud.
But I wonder, in light of technologies like Google Wave, whether e4 is really getting us there. We should be looking at new workflows that make sense in this world. My plan is to bring this to the e4 team and ask them if they really think what they are working on does that.